


Stay Strong

by wonderfulbluishbox



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Imprisonment, Loneliness, Prison, The Doctor (Doctor Who) Needs a Hug, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:41:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27840925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wonderfulbluishbox/pseuds/wonderfulbluishbox
Summary: She constantly wonders if this was meant as a punishment. To have stars, hundreds of stars, speckled across inky black, reminding her of how many galaxies she is yet to explore. How many stars are hidden in the gaps between the ones she can see. For every star, there are billions more out there, and her hearts flitter sadly at the memories of being free. Of dancing from planet to star, from supernova to nebula. Feeling sunlight, rain, snow, warm, cold on her skin. Tilting her head back, closing her eyes, sensing the shifting of space around her, the very essence of time flooding her veins.It’s hard to get a sense of anything here.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 21





	Stay Strong

**Author's Note:**

> Just a short, angsty, whumpy piece inspired by the trailer and Thirteen looking so lonesome and sad in the prison. Her gazing out of the window just gave me all the feels. Someone give her a hug. Please.

_ How many people in the universe get to meet the Doctor, let alone travel with her? _

Prisoner One-Three-One-Two-Three props her chin on her arms, the cold rock digging in through the material of her jumpsuit. She does not notice the fizzling blue bars that cage her in—although her fingers tingle unpleasantly at the memory of first touching them, and how she woke up hours later, sprawled on the floor, fresh burns scarring her hands. No, she can’t see those bars. She likes to imagine they’re not there. That there’s nothing between her and the open space that is spread out before her cell.

She constantly wonders if this was meant as a punishment. To have stars, hundreds of stars, speckled across inky black, reminding her of how many galaxies she is yet to explore. How many stars are hidden in the gaps between the ones she can see. For every star, there are billions more out there, and her hearts flitter sadly at the memories of being free. Of dancing from planet to star, from supernova to nebula. Feeling sunlight, rain, snow, warm, cold on her skin. Tilting her head back, closing her eyes, sensing the shifting of space around her, the very essence of time flooding her veins.

It’s hard to get a sense of anything here. She tries lifting her chin now, letting her leaden head fall backwards, greasy strands of hair tickling her neck. There is… there is nothing here. The shaky inhale and exhale of her breathing, so loud in her confinement. The double rhythm of her hearts, always drumming on the edge of her consciousness, in the safety of her ribcage. Their own cell. Pulsing away, keeping her alive, keeping her alive when she feels like there is little to nothing worth living for right now.

Adjusting her position, the Doctor runs a tongue over her cracked lips and withdraws into the depths of her mind for a while, her eyes remaining fixed on the stars. She wanders amongst thoughts, amongst emotions. Holding onto the good, pushing away the bad, crushing the ugly underfoot. More often than not, she is left like this—trekking across her own psyche, hiding away from the world, trying to bring warmth to her icy face. A blush here, a flush there, reliving the happy, the exciting, the lovable… anything that sends a thrill down her spine.

Or brings tears of sorrow, wetting her eyelashes, trickling down her cheeks as she chokes back a sob. The prison is built in an asteroid, and the asteroid revolves slowly, a chilling planet on its axis. For a good chunk of her day, she is faced with nothing but an expanse of black, black that stretches into every corner of the known space that she can see. No matter how far she leans forward, no matter what angle she slants her head at, there is simply darkness.

And then she slips. And her cheeks touch the bars. And she wakes up hours later, bones aching from the crash against the merciless floor. And the cycle repeats.

Once a week, she is half-led, half-pulled by guards down corridors that wind and twist and slope in dizzying patterns. Locked in a cage in the middle of a giant hall, surrounded by hundreds of prison inmates. She is yet to work out what the point of this is—the first few days, she tried chatting with the people around her, her too-merry voice piercing the heavy silence that oppressed the hall. Poisonous glares were thrown her way, until perhaps a thousand different pairs of eyes were fixed on her, threatening her wordlessly. Her voice trailed off. She hung her head, hands interlocking into a tight grasp against her thighs, muttering an apology that didn’t quite reach her ears.

Her jumpsuit was brand new back then.

Rough, scratchy material. Her prison number across her chest, her new name, her new title, the digits that define all that she is in this lonely existence. A black sash down one side, inscripted with white lettering that her weary mind cannot decipher. She reckons it’s the psychic filters built into the cell. She overheard the guards discussing them once. Designed to confuse the mind, to wipe any information from the inmate that they could use to break out. It explains why she can never memorise the maze of corridors, of vault-style doors and harsh turquoise lights. Over time, the psychic filters have broken down her own mental barriers, until they can bleed in any time they want to. Buzzing at the back of her head, sometimes a dull ache, other times searing straight through her skull.

Those are the times when she is too exhausted, too weak to get up from the broken bed in the middle of her cell. Those are the times where she folds into herself, fatigued from the nothingness that plagues each and every day. Those are the times where she hides her head in the crook of her elbows, and wishes she could fall asleep and never wake up again.

Her jumpsuit is red. Scarlet, vermillion, carmine. Blood red, some might say. But her blood is not quite red. It is dark orange, the shade of infernos raging against a sunset. The shade of rippling copper, bittersweet and metallic. The shade of the dust of her home planet, nothing more than a skeleton of a disintegrated childhood, the ruins of an eons-ago age when she didn’t have the weight of the universe on her shoulders.

Clenching her jaw, cursing herself for letting the image of her home taunt her mind, she edges away from the bars, away from the space she longs to travel through once more. Turning her back on it entirely is hard: she knows in less than a couple of hours, the darkness will arrive and the only light in her cell will be the artificial cyan leaking beneath her door. Too many times, she has hammered that door, pounding it in rhythmical beats that leave knuckle-sized dents in the metal, that bring the guards running, that are shadowed by stuttering apologies and flinches at the guns glinting on their hips. As soon as the door booms shut, she has let her fingers—originally fisted by her sides, dreading the need of self-defence—unfurl like baby flowers. Fresh out of the bud. Scraped by the impact of metal against skin. Throbbing, stinging, pleading to be tucked away again, to be shoved into pockets that are no longer there.

She aches as she trudges the short distance to the corner, hands tucked into her armpits, shoulders slumped, head bowed like she is mourning the loss of someone close, someone wonderful, someone as ethereal as the sheer beauty of the stars themselves.

Maybe she is. It’s hard to think straight nowadays. It’s hard to think at all.

Raising her eyes, she takes in the markings on the walls. Lines, lines, hundreds upon hundreds of lines. Thousands. Tallying the days gone by, the rotations of the asteroid, the numbing circles that she promises herself she’ll break free from, every single day.

Funny. She promises herself a lot. Yet she can never work hard enough to make those promises come true.

Sinking down into the corner, she rests her head against the rock and allows her eyelids to flutter close for just a moment.

She wakes, curled up, arms tight around her hunched knees, face hidden in coarse material. To her absolute horror, she finds she has been crying again. Her throat is sore, her cheeks prickling with the tracks of the salty droplets. Dragging a sleeve across her face, she eases herself upright, bracing her hands either side to steady herself. A sliver of chalk, no wider than her index finger, sits by her toe. She bends, picks it up. Rolls it listlessly between the pad of her finger and thumb for a while.

Then she finds a space on the wall. A space amongst the tallies, amongst the reminders of broken promises and the indefinite length of time. The chalk shakes in her hand as she raises it up, and falls into her lap. She picks it up again. It falls. She picks it up. It falls. Eventually, she grips onto it so tightly, it snaps clean in two.

In a moment of frustration, she grinds one half to dust beneath her heel, a spiteful satisfaction coursing through her veins for the briefest of moments. Gaining a tiny victory over such a pointless thing feels stupid, but she enjoys it for the seconds that she can. For so long, she has had no power. No control over anything. Forced to keep down, to stay silent, to obey—or face the price. 

This is not her. This is not the person she remembers being. The ghost whom she recalls has no regards for the rules. They’re easygoing, intelligent, cheerful, swanning through space and time without a care in the world. Always running into danger, sprinting out of it at double the speed, side by side with their companions. Their friends. Their—

She scratches three names into the space with the remaining chalk, letters looping around each other, distorted by the juts and ridges of the rock, sketching a tiny pair of hearts by each one. Then, after a moment’s pause, she adds a fourth. And stares at this name for a while.

Discordant emotions coil in her gut. Sadness… is he really out there at all? Fear… what if she’s lost him for good, that time has run away with him and left her behind, in the shadows? Anger—why, why,  _ why  _ hasn’t he come for her? After that message he left her, after that promise he made—why? Why has she been left here, in some godforsaken, abandoned corner of the universe? He left her with an impossible choice, two decisions that would wreak havoc across the universe either way, and this is how he apologises to her?

She lets out a noise that is somewhat a cough and a sob, a cry for help and a cry of defeat. A blur of words tumble over her chapped lips. She pauses, breathing heavily, hands dropping onto her knees. 

_ Love is a form of hope. And like hope, love abides _ .

Love… she wishes she’d shown them more love, back then, when they were asking questions and she was pushing them away and she didn’t recognise, didn’t realise that they  _ cared _ . She kept them at an arm’s distance, never letting them touch her, never letting them hug her. Always backing away at the first signs of questioning, of concern, of… of…  _ fondness _ . The mixture of exasperation and love in their eyes as they reached out to her, and she ran. Too uncertain to talk. Too scared of how they’d react to her pouring out her emotions.

So she hid. Bottled up everything, shoved it away where she knew it would come back for her. Locked it in its own prison.

And now she is paying the price.

And they think she is dead. 

Her lips open. Her voice quavers in the air, tinged with sadness, with loneliness… and somewhere, laced amongst the letters, the dying embers of hope. Fuelled by a single string of optimism, glowing and fading whenever she gazes out at the stars. She cannot tell whether she is lying to herself or not. But maybe she needs the reassurance, no matter how fake. Needs something to cling onto, like a child hugging a well-worn teddy, even as the years slip by and the teddy becomes something buried in distant memories, something that slips from existence in the everflowing stream of time.

“Stay strong,” she murmurs. “People are waiting for you.”

It’s a lie.

She wants to believe it’s the truth.

Time bristles and slides around her, her timeline oscillating, reforming, fixing jagged pieces back together, starting to heal the gashes. She lets her head drop onto her knees, her eyes close once more, her fingers sliding into the once-blonde strands of her hair.

Something is coming for her.

She can feel it.

Whether it’s the pathway to a world that exists only in her head right now, or the end of everything that she craves so much, she cannot tell.

_ Being with the Doctor, you don’t get to choose when it stops. Whether you leave her. Or she leaves you. _


End file.
